Third place for Best Presentation at the SCS Student Conference

Congratulations to Colin Wai-Loen Berendt and Loris Fabian Klindworth, who won third place for Best Presentation at the SCS Student Conference on 11 December 2025 with their Bachelor Project BATradar: Acoustic Drone Localization Engine.

The SCS Student Conference is where our students present their final works, bachelor projects (BP) and integrative master’s projects (IMP), to peers and faculty. Colin and Loris were among the finalists, and their talk on BATradar took third place for the best presentation.

Why it matters. Drones are everywhere now, from hobby videography to surveillance and even warfare, and spotting an unwanted one is surprisingly hard. The usual approach, tracking a drone’s radio link, fails against autonomous drones that fly without transmitting, while radar and camera installations are expensive and need a clear line of sight. Detecting a small drone cheaply, and passively, is an open problem with real safety, privacy, and security stakes.

The idea. The team was chasing counter-drone capability that is cheap and portable: the longer-term vision is something as small and affordable as a pocket drone that could detect and intercept an intruder, instead of a costly fixed installation. As a first step, BATradar tackles the hardest part, finding a drone from sound alone. A set of inexpensive, synchronized microphones listens for the distinctive whine of the rotors, recognizes it, and triangulates the drone’s position, combining time-difference-of-arrival, direction-of-arrival, and multilateration with a small neural network trained on the acoustic signature. In quiet conditions the detector exceeded 99% accuracy, and the project also mapped honestly where low-budget hardware runs into physics, pointing to pairing acoustic sensing with RF for the toughest cases.

A short demo shows the engine locating a drone from sound alone:

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Well done to both. The project was supervised by Karim Khamaisi and Bruno Rodrigues. Read the full project.